Do you know all the major strategies for getting valuable
one-way inbound links?

With search engines putting a damper on direct reciprocal
links, the hunt for the elusive one-way inbound link is on.

As someone who works with small business website owners, I've
heard just about every inbound-linking scheme there is. In the
end, I've only seen five strategies that really work
consistently for getting hundreds of links. Yet there's
perennial interest in alternative linking strategies. Why?
Perhaps because the five major effective strategies involve a
certain amount of hard work, and for many people, SEO is an
endless magic bean hunt.

Let's look at some of the supposedly easier alternatives:

* Link farms never seem to die. The latest variations try to
pass themselves off as viral marketing, but are really a sort
of endless pyramid scheme: you link to me, I link to someone
else, who links to someone else, and on and on down the line.
If you think this will work, let's just say I admire your
ability to maintain a childlike innocence despite all the mean
names I'm sure everyone calls you.

* Many one-way inbound linking strategies fall into the
great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as
winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank
website just for being so great.

* Other one-way incoming link strategies are in the
this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as
offering to provide testimonials to all your vendors in
exchange for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more
than twenty links that way, you probably need to simplify your
supply line.)

* Other linking methods are slightly less practical, like
engendering the hatred of billions of people so they'll all
link to you with "miserable failure" in the link anchor text so
that--ha! ha!--you'll show up in searches for "miserable
failure"--and probably other keywords as well since you'll have
such great link popularity at that point (ha! ha!).

Now, on to the five major ways of getting large numbers of
one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they
all have more potential than some of the more madcapped
strategies. Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own.
You have to understand all five strategies in order to really
gain a distinct advantage in the one-way link hunt.

1. Waiting for Inbound Links

If you have good content you will eventually get one-way
inbound links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given
links are an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you cannot
rely on them, for two reasons:

a. Unfortunately, "eventually" can be a very long time.

b. There is a vicious cycle: you can't get search engine
traffic, or other non-paid traffic, without inbound links; yet
without inbound links or search engine traffic, how is anyone
going to find you to give you inbound links?

2. Triangulating for Inbound Links

Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal
links if the reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one
website you offer in exchange a link from another website you
also control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of
defeating the link-dampening ambitions of Google and the rest.
If you have more than one website, you probably are already
employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:

* You need to have more than one website. Stop laughing! There
really are businesses that only have one website! In fact, they
may be your clients someday.

* The work required to set up this kind of arrangement and
verify compliance is not insignificant. The process cannot be
automated to the same extent as direct one-to-one reciprocal
linking.

* As with traditional reciprocal links, a very big drawback is
that the links are mostly on "Resources" pages that are just
lists of links. There's only a small chance of getting
significant traffic from these links. Plus, any "Resource" page
may well eventually become an easy target for link dampening, if
that hasn't happened already.

3. Submitting for Incoming Links

They are the legendary fairy lands of SEO: PageRank-passing,
no-fee-charging, non-corrupt and actually well-run directories
of relevant links. Yes, they really do exist. An SEO friend
tells me he knows 200 good ones just off the top of his head.
Plus, there are other kinds of directories: directories of
affiliate programs, of websites using a certain content
management system, of websites whose owners are members of this
or that group, of websites accepting PayPal, etc. etc.

Ah, a link in a PageRank-passing link directory: it's a good
deal if you can get it. But let's say you do get links from all
200 such directories and a hundred more from the little niche
directories--now what?

4. Paying for Inbound Links

Buying and selling text links on high-PageRank web pages has
become big business. Buying good traffic-generating "clean"
links is a great alternative to pay-per-click advertising,
which confers no SEO benefit. But, there are a number of
pitfalls of relying primarily on paid links for SEO:

a. The cost of the hundreds of links required for substantial
search engine traffic can become prohibitive.

b. As soon as you stop paying, you lose your link--you are
essentially renting rather than owning, with no "link equity"
building up.

c. Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of paid links
on rankings, as revealed in various patent filings.

d. Given Google's mission to dampen paid links' effectiveness,
paid link buyers have an interest in verifying that a potential
paid link partner is "passing PageRank." But identifying
appropriate PageRank-passing paid link partners is quite a task
in itself.

e. Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of any
"artificial" linking campaign. Having most of your links on
PageRank 3 or higher web pages would seem to be a dead
give-away that your links are "artificial," since the vast
majority of web pages (note: not necessarily websites, but
their pages) are PageRank 1 or lower. Meanwhile, buying
PageRank 0 or 1 links would have so little impact on a site's
PageRank that it would not be worth the expense.

All of the above four inbound-link-generating methods really do
work. But it is the fifth method of getting one-way inbound
links that is the most promising?

Distributing Content for One-Way Inbound Links

A time-honored way of getting one-way inbound links is to
distribute content, usually articles, for other websites to
publish in exchange for a backlink. Usually, the backlink is
included in an "author's resource box," which is a brief "about
the author" paragraph promoting the author's site. If done
right, content distribution is almost always the most
cost-effective way to get one-way inbound links.

Myths about distributing content for inbound links

Given the enormous value of distributing content for inbound
links, the big question is: why isn't everybody doing it? Part
of the problem is the ignorance about properly conducting a
content distribution linking campaign. Here are some common
myths:
Myth: The "Duplicate content penalty."

Some webmasters worry that if the content on their sites is
suddenly on hundreds of other sites, search engines will
inflict a "duplicate content penalty." Why is this ridiculous?

* If this were true, every major newspaper and news portal
website would now be de-indexed from the search engines, since
they all carry "duplicate content" from the news wires such as
Reuters and the Associated Press.

* Thousands of self-promoting internet gurus have proven that
distributing content is an effective method of improving search
engine rank.

* Even more thousands of content websites have proven that
republishing this content does not carry any search engine
penalty.

* True, the first website to publish an article often seems to
be favored by search engines, ranking higher for the same
content in searches than higher-PageRank pages with the same
content. But the "duplicate" pages do show up in the search
engine results, even if lower than the original site.
Meanwhile, the reprint content has no effect on the ranking of
a site's other pages.

* The only duplicate content penalty is for duplication of
content across pages of a single website. Meanwhile, there is a
sort of "copyright theft" penalty, whereby someone who copies
content without permission can be manually removed from search
engine indexes out of respect for the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act. But that penalty is only for flagrant theft, not
minor mistakes in attributing reprint content.

Myth: Distribution is for article clearinghouse websites only.

There are over 100 popular, high-traffic websites that act as
clearinghouses for content made available for redistribution.
These websites include isnare.com, amazines.com, and
goarticles.com.

Submitting content to these sites is useful since good content
will subsequently be picked up by other sites from them,
generating valuable backlinks.

So, what's the problem with content clearinghouse websites?
Many novice content-distributors believe that these are the
only websites to which content should be submitted.

These novices then are upset when the article clearinghouse
websites, with tens of thousands of articles each with a
backlink, pass negligible PageRank.

But to maximize PageRank-passing links, you have to submit
articles to webmasters individually.

Myth: Any content will do.

* Fact: it should be obvious that many website owners, jealous
of their link popularity, will only republish exceptionally
high-quality content. For articles, this means a unique point
of view and solid information that cannot be found just
anywhere, ideally presented in compelling language in a
web-optimized format by a professional published writer. You
can conduct a content distribution campaign with bad content,
but you'll be handicapping yourself from the start.

* Fact: A content distribution campaign requires skillful
planning. The most likely relevant categories of websites to
republish articles must be identified. Relevance of
republishing websites has to be balanced against the number of
potential republishing websites both when creating content to
distribute and when targeting sites for distribution. For
instance, our own article marketing campaigns target not just
sites focusing on web content, but also broad categories of
interest, such as: web design, webmaster issues, writing,
marketing, business, website promotion, and SEO. To maximize
success, articles have to be custom-written for each category,
and refined for sub-categories such as accessible web design,
affiliate webmaster issues, freelance writing, and web
marketing.

* Fact: You need at least three different articles of varying
lengths and focus to have a shot at targeting
high-PageRank-websites effectively. Many experienced article
marketers recommend having 25 or more articles on hand to
maximize results.

Distinct non-SEO benefits of distributing content for inbound
links

Content distribution in exchange for backlinks predates SEO. In
fact, for many content distributors, these non-SEO benefits are
the primary goals:

* Traffic generation. More than any other method of getting
links, the links in distributed content generate traffic.
Distributing content gets you traffic even when it doesn't get
you a link. If your article gets picked up by a
large-circulation email newsletter, you will get a flood of
highly qualified traffic.

* Authority. Distributing content is the only linking campaign
method that can make the recipient website and its owners
appear authoritative. There are thousands of internet gurus who
owe their lucrative reputations entirely to the articles they've
distributed.

* Mindshare. Distributing articles is the only linking campaign
method that can help you spread an idea. This makes article
distribution invaluable for launching new products or services.


Drawbacks of Content Distribution

Of course, nothing good ever came easy. Any website owners who
are looking for SEO magic beans will be disappointed by content
distribution:

* Results are variable. Content distribution is not quite as
sure a thing as buying links. You cannot say for sure at the
outset how much of an investment it will require to get X
number of links with X PageRank. Of course, this variability is
one reason why links from content distribution may appear less
"artificial" to search engines.

* Requires significant investment. You need high-quality
content, expertise in content distribution, and quite a few
work-hours to distribute the content and track the results.
These costs can be mitigated by outsourcing the entire process
from soup to nuts to a content distribution specialist.
Further, the cost has to be weighed against the cost of other
link campaigns, which is also significant.

* Requires special expertise. There are numerous newbie
pitfalls to distributing content, from improperly formatting
articles to writing a bad introductory email to accompany
content submissions. You generally have to have done numerous
campaigns to truly get the feel for it. Again, this drawback
can be mitigated by outsourcing your project to a specialist.
And again, this requirement has to be weighed against the
real-world requirement of special expertise in other link
campaign methods.

In conclusion, there are a number of ways of getting one-way
inbound links, and if you're smart, you'll use all of them.
Still, there's only one method that carries substantial non-SEO
benefits as well, and that's content distribution. I know, I
know: focusing on content just feels like you're giving in to
Google. But don't fight it. When it comes to getting high
search engine rankings through content, you know you want it.


About The Author:

Joel Walsh is the owner of UpMarket Content,
where you can get a content distribution campaign guaranteed to
get you at least one hundred one-way inbound links for every
three articles:
http://upmarketcontent.com/website-promotion-package.htm